Monotony, a world order

Every evening I look out of my balcony at the creamish-white moon on the backdrop of a deep blue sky. It is surreal; for an instance, life seems almost perfect.

Then I hear a drone in the kitchen. I snap out, as if from a trance. What I thought was the moon is actually a tube-light from a top floor apartment. Reality comes back into focus, complete with concrete walls and high rises, routine schedules and to-do lists.

Over the years, I have learnt that life is just like that illusory moonlight out there, full of quixotic moments and banal realities.

There are those flashes of pure bliss, those seconds when I feel on top of the world. Like when a kind old lady in a car offers to drop me at the taxi stand ‘cos it is pouring like mad, when people I have long lost contact with ping me on GTalk to say that my latest post struck a chord with them, when a group of friends decide to surprise me with a birthday gift I would never have been able to imagine, when my many-day yearning to catch Haji Ali at sunrise is finally fulfilled.

The here and the now, the quintessential elements of my existence just then make me ask, “What if time was to freeze at those moments? What if I could stay with those moments eternally?”

However, the mundane takes over the fantastic, for that is the world order. There are rains and flooded roads. There are days of unexplainable and self-inflicted loneliness, days of never-ending work and piled up responsibilities. There are choice-less times with only one way to take, the tried and tested one way.

Sometimes, I wonder whether it is too much to ask for more than my fair share of stay in seventh heaven, whether moments of serendipity could be stretched into hours, perhaps days, perhaps years. But, then, it would not be serendipity any more. That is why fate doles it out in small doses, like single shots of chocolate every fortnight, not enough to satiate the longing, just enough to crave for more.